The Tate wants its presence to be felt beyond the Turbine Hall or Liverpool Docks and, to that end, it plans to transform its website into a broadband arts channel. Tate Media, which will launch this September, will operate across the internet, television production, magazine publishing and major public events.

The gallery is one of the first major arts institutions to create a division to oversee its new media output and, according to the head of Tate Media, Will Gompertz, intellectual property rights are at the heart of its leap into the cultural future. "It is important that within the visual arts landscape Tate has an arts channel that gets our point across and works very closely with artists and curators," he says. "Now we can't have that unless we own the content."

For example, the BBC may make a programme on one of the Tate's current exhibitions, such as Howard Hodgkin. However, once that exhibition has ended the intellectual property rights walk out the door because in most cases the Corporation will not let its programme be shown on a non-BBC website.

"People come to the Tate wanting to be able to access that sort of information and we are not able to give it to them," explains Gompertz. "There are also a lot of fantastic exhibitions and curating at the Tate that are not covered by television broadcasters."

The forthcoming exhibition of works by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss is unlikely to be covered by the terrestrial broadcasters because the pair remain relatively unknown in Britain. But they have a large international following and the Tate is keen to tap into that global audience.

"Tate Media is about going deep and global rather than shallow and local," says Gompertz. "We put on shows but we have nothing to share with the audience once the show is gone. The real value for Tate and our audiences is in the 'long tail' - the ability to access that information in perpetuity and for Tate to be able to offer it to them, whether it is an educational programme, whether it is downloadable in different formats or whether it is interactive."

An online archive of films and programmes should be available free of charge to the public, says Gompertz, who adds that the power of the Tate brand makes a broadband arts channel viable. One of Tate Media's early forays into television production will be this year's Turner Prize, for which it is co-producing a series of programmes with Channel 4.